Blog

On December 6 2018, the Norwegian Parliament decided to allow dual citizenship, bringing the country back in line with its Nordic neighbors. The decision breaks with the historical tradition of singular citizenship, but was already proposed by the current conservative Government in its political platform in 2017. The fact that it was a conservative government that proposed the amendment of the Nationality law is testament to a changing rationale for the introduction of dual citizenship in the Nordic region, where retainment of citizenship for emigrants and national security issues are key arguments. The amendment is expected to enter into force in 2020. Read More …

The content of citizenship laws can be politically controversial in any country. African states, whose borders were, for the most part, arbitrarily created at the stroke of a pen in Berlin in 1885, have particular challenges. The 1964 decision of the newly formed Organisation of African Unity to respect those borders committed the continent to the task of moulding the colonial units into legitimate political communities. Read More …

On Sunday 25th November 2018, the European Council gave its political blessing to the draft of the Withdrawal Agreement whereby the United Kingdom will leave the European Union. From the outset of negotiations, the European Council identified protecting the rights of UK nationals in EU Member States and EU nationals in the United Kingdom as a priority in its guidelines. These efforts have culminated in Part II of the Agreement. This post will provide a brief overview of the substance of these provisions, and the mechanisms that have been established to ensure their enforcement. Read More …

This week, Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton announced the federal government’s intention to introduce changes to Australia’s citizenship-stripping laws. The proposed changes would likely make Australia’s regime for citizenship-stripping the most expansive in the world. I’ll outline how the proposal would change the current law, and analyse its key elements. Read More …

Finland accepted multiple citizenship with a broad consensus across the political parties in 2003. However, it was not until the autumn of 2014 that the issue of dual citizenship reached public consciousness when President of the Republic highlighted the need for a comparative review of multiple citizenship and its conditions in different countries. This request came around the same time as Russia introduced new legislation on the compulsory registration of foreign citizenships and the Ukraine crisis had intensified in the spring and summer of 2014. Read More …

On October 7, 3.3 million voters received an unwelcome surprise on Election Day in Brazil. They were, in fact, no longer voters. Roughly half of the country’s municipalities had moved to compulsory biometric identification for this election, which required voters to go to the Electoral Court in their region and register their fingerprints.

Voter registration was a big flashpoint in the U.S., possibly affecting the turnout of certain segments of the population disproportionately. Might it have had an effect on the Brazilian election as well? After all, any possible effect would not have been captured by polls, since voters with cancelled registration would likely have not known and responded to polls as likely voters. This would mean that our pre-electoral predictions would have been off-base if there truly was an influence. Read More …

The European Union, many believe, has a democratic deficit. The sovereign nation-state is seen as democratically superior. Even more, it is often argued that the EU undermines the functioning of national democracies, compounding this alleged democratic deficit.

In our article we show that when it comes to the electoral inclusion of immigrants, nation states suffer from a democratic deficit and the EU plays a democracy-enhancing role. European democracies are much more exclusive than they should be according to normative standards derived from democratic theory. The EU has been key to mitigating the exclusiveness of democracies. By requiring its member states to enfranchise non-national EU citizens on the local level, it pushes one of the currently most relevant “frontiers of democracy” in the right direction. Read More …

On the 6th July 2018, new amendments of the Portuguese Nationality Law entered in force (Organic Law 2/2018). The amendment involves at least four important topics, in addition to some minor changes. Read More …

Recently, a lower Dutch Court decided on the admissibility of an appeal against one of the decisions concerning the Dutch Alcolock case, in which the Dutch Supreme Court held that imposing an administrative law sanction (the installation of an alcolock) precluded criminal law punishment (for driving under the influence) and vice versa. Read More …

On the 12th of June the ECHR declared a violation of the right to private life (article 8) of two individuals who were left stateless in Russia for several years as a result of bureaucratic deficiencies not attributable to them. The judgment strengthens even further the Court’s earlier case law on the connection between nationality rights, statelessness, and article 8 of the ECHR. Read More …